settling up time.  It was ten years before he got a start.  It was hard to get ahead then because the niggers had just got free and didn’t have nothin’ and didn’t know nothin’.  My father had two brothers that just stayed on with the white folks.  They stayed on till they got too old to work, then they had to go.  Couldn’t do no good then.  My father was always treated well by his master.

“I got my schooling at Warren.  I went to the tenth grade.  Could have gone farther but didn’t want to.  I was looking at something I thought was better than education.  When I got of age, I come up here and just run about.  I was what you might say pretty fine.  I was looking so high I couldn’t find nothing to suit me.  I went ’round to a number of places and none of them suited me.  So I went on back home and been there ever since.

“I married once in my life.  My wife is still living.  My wife is a good woman.  No, if I got rid of this one, wouldn’t do to take another one.  I am the father of ten living children.  I made a living by doing anything that come up—­housework, gardening, anything.

“I don’t get no government help.  I don’t want none yet.  God has seen me this far.  I think He’ll see me to the end.  He is good to me; He’s given me such a good time I couldn’t help but serve Him.  Only been sick once in seventy years.

“I belong to the Baptist church.  God is my boss now.  He has brought me this far and He’s able to carry me across”

Interviewer:  Mrs. Bernice Bowden
Person interviewed:  Eliza Frazier
                    2003 Saracen Street, Pine Bluff, Arkansas
Age:  88?

“I don’t know when I was born or ’zackly how old I is, but I was born in South Carolina and come here before the War.

“I belonged to Wiley Mosley and he brought me and my mother and my sister here to Arkansas.  I don’t ’member it at all ’cause I was a baby, but I know what Wiley Mosley and my mother told me.

“Settled in Redland Township.  That’s what they called it.  He bought a plantation there.  There was three brothers come to this country and they didn’t live very far from each other.

“I ‘member hearin’ ’em talk ’bout the War and one time I heered the guns a poppin’.  They said they was just passin’ through.  I was just a small girl but I ’member it.  I seed the Yankees too.  I ’member they’d come up in the yard on hosses and jump down and go in the smokehouse and take the meat and go to the dairy house and get the milk.

“Old master was gone to the War.  I ’member when he was gwine and I ’member when he come back.  Old missis said he was up in Missouri.  Got shot right through the foot once.  I know he come home and stayed ’til he was well, then he went back.  I don’t know how long he stayed but he went back—­I know that.  And he come back after the War—­I ’member that.

“I ’member one time when I upset the cradle.  Miss Jane wouldn’t ’low me to take the baby up but I rocked the cradle.  And one time I reckon I rocked it too hard and it turned over.  Miss Jane heard it time it hit the floor and she come runnin’.  I was under the house by that time but she called me out and whipped me and told me to get back in the house.  I know I didn’t turn it over no more.